Ascending-bid auction for unequal-erasure-protected network coding

According to our previous paper, global encoding kernels (GEKs) describing linear network codes have different levels of built-in unequal-erasure-protecting (UEP) capability. This creates conflicts among sink nodes in a multicast session since a particular assignment of GEKs favors one sink node over another. This paper proposes a resolution to the conflict by means of a simple ascending-bid auction scheme which has three obvious benefits. First, it frees all the nodes from the complicated optimization algorithms that might otherwise be used. Second, it provides the source node with some revenue. Lastly, it allows the richer sink nodes to receive the data with better quality.